Photographer Kent Krugh’s project Speciation is a series of X-ray photos of cameras that provides a brief history of photography, as told through the evolution of the camera.
“This work uses x-rays to explore the micro-evolution of cameras and is a metaphor about the limits of evolution,” Krugh writes. “While form and media may have changed, the camera is still a camera: a tool to create images by capturing photons of light.”
While the basic concept of what a camera is and does has not changed, the outward appearance and inner workings have, and Krugh’s images offer a look into the wide range of camera designs that have appeared over the years.
“While making these x-rays, I have been surprised and astonished by what I found inside the cameras,” Krugh says. “[A] camera is still a camera, though tremendous diversity exists.”
Brazilian photographer Marcio Cabral won the “Animals in Their Environment” category for the 2017 Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest with his photo titled “The Night Raider”. The photo showed an anteater at a termite mound, captioned:
For three seasons, Marcio had camped out in Brazil’s Cerrado region, on the vast treeless savanna of Emas national park, waiting to capture the termite mounds’ light display. Click beetle larvae living in the outer layers of the mounds flash their bioluminescent “headlights” to lure in prey – the flying termites. Out of the darkness ambled a giant anteater, oblivious of Marcio in his hide, and began to attack the tall, concrete-mud mound with its powerful claws to reach the termites deep inside.
After the award was announced, an anonymous source noticed a remarkable similarity between the stuffed anteater found at one of the entrances of the same national park and the one featuring in Cabral’s photograph.
Photo courtesy Natural History Museum
The National History Museum, enlisted the help of five scientists to investigate. The team comprised two mammal experts and a taxidermy specialist at the NHM, as well as two external experts (one in South American mammals and one specifically in anteaters).
After comparing the anteater in the winning photo with the stuffed on at the park, all five scientists independently concluded that the two were exactly the same anteater: the two anteaters are strikingly similar, but many of the more prominent features and similarities are actually shared among all anteaters. It’s the tiny details that the experts concluded to be too similar.
They “all reached the same conclusion that there are elements in overall posture, morphology, the position of raised tufts of fur and in the patterning on the neck and the top of the head that are too similar for the images to depict two different animals,” the museum wrote.
After “careful and thorough investigation,” the National History Museum announced that Cabral’s photo has been disqualified and the photographer has been stripped of his prize. The photo will also be removed from the contest’s exhibition and tour.
Cabral continues to strongly deny that photo contains a stuffed anteater and it is important to point out that while there are striking similarities between the two images (and anteaters), there are also notable differences: the stuffed anteater has a large white patch of fur on its front leg, not evident on Cabral’s photograph, for example.
Read the Natural History Museum’s web statement HERE.
So big is the news of this story that it has even made it onto Conan O’Brien’s late night talk show:
Researchers with the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign and Intel have developed a deep neural network that brightens ultra-low light images without adding noise and other artefacts. The network was trained using 5,094 raw short-exposure low-light and long-exposure image pairs—the end result is a system that automatically brightens images at a much higher quality than traditional processing options.
Traditional methods to process low light images result typically in high levels of noise that is absent using the machine learning process:
These almost unbelievable examples of machine learning are revealed in the video below:
A visit to St. Hilda’s College Chapel became more urgent than was expected on hearing of its planned demolition within weeks. It was relieving to discover that there were only two stained glass windows (six lights) within the chapel, eased further by being granted open access to photograph them. Weather conditions today were perfect: bright, but over cast, the windows were clean and at head height. This had the makings of a straightforward, yet very poignant photo shoot. It transpired that I would be the first and last person to photograph (specifically) these windows.
At first glance all looked good and while the two windows were a little too modern in appearance for my liking, each told a clear and simple story. My initial placement shot revealed the first difficulty: The stained glass stood in front of much older panelled windows with the panels and window furniture clearly visible:
However, head-on, the full horror story became evident…
Everything could be seen through these stained glass windows. Even shooting at f/1.2 could not mask the red Ford Focus.
Notwithstanding, I completed the capture of a full set of images, albeit rather car-oriented. However, I have now entered into delicate negotiations with the College, in order to be granted access to the windows once they have been removed from the chapel, with the hope of photographing them clutter-free. If my plan comes to fruition, I have only to worry about where I might place the six lights to capture them against a backlit, neutral white background.
The assorted very helpful online instructions and guides to this work highlighted one area that it seemed foolhardy to include: sound recordings. Such an option was crossed firmly off my list. However, I did dabble, even to the extent of committing several hours to re-editing some soundbites, but then I revisited the advice section and decided not to make such an inclusion: wrong choice, since feedback suggested that this might have benefitted my presentation! This area I shall revisit in future oral presentations and time will also be given to ‘other artefacts’ – although I am currently unsure what they could/might be!
With a suggested ‘indicative length of 1500 words’, I was more than a little anxious as I raced past the 3000 words and battled hard to cut out comment that I considered less relevant in order to keep the word-count down. The feedback on this work suggested numerous other paths off investigation and observation that I could have made – some of which I had already covered, but then deleted as I felt that more than a 110%+ over-submission would not be well received. Perhaps it would be more helpful if there was not a suggestion of length, as this does not appear to influence the grading.
With a proposed project title ‘The Stained Glass windows of Oxford Chapels’, I was keen to tie-in a themed layout to the paper. Oxford’s famous skyline, punctuated as it is by the college chapel spires, seemed so utterly appropriate so to that end, I created a horizontal line that evolved into the Oxford skyline:
To avoid any ambiguity or confusion, my opening comment reflected upon this: ‘Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Thyrsis’ called Oxford ‘the city of dreaming spires’ for good reason: the large number of University Colleges and private schools resulted in an extraordinary wealth of chapels, with more than 40 located in the city, painting a stunning skyline of towers and spires.’
The feedback upon this decision was more than a little surprising… ‘Interesting use of a header throughout the submission which brings some impression of professionalism. Curiously, the image refers more to Oxford than to the stained glass windows, which could be read as slightly confusing.’ On this point, we will have to differ.
My use of Oxford Blue as the colour of this line was far too subtle, but typical of the attention to detail that has always interposed my professional design, publishing and reprographic work.
Oxford Blue is the official colour of the University of Oxford. The official Oxford blue visual identity guidelines set the definition of Oxford Blue as Pantone 282, equivalent to the following colour coordinates:
The concise and well thought-through guidance was much appreciated. I had never considered reproducing the stained glass windows at 1:1 scale, but like the idea. With some of them 6m+ tall and 6m+ wide, image resolution and inevitable high costs might preclude such plans. I also wonder who would have the space and desire for such a large image. Notwithstanding, this is a route worth pursuing.
I had not thought through of the potential limiting factor of submitting a PDF portfolio – I almost always view PDF’s onscreen and imagined that that would be the case during the assessment off the portfolio. It is very true that the images lend themselves better to a screen (although it is quite possible that the portrait A3 printed PDF I supplied would reveal more detail than when viewed on a screen). I do wonder how best a portfolio can be displayed online… something I will need to address in future.
Uniquely, this is Oxford’s only un-consecrated chapel. It has no religious affiliation, so the large Reginald Bell stained glass west window depicting Christ comes as a surprise and juxtaposes the ‘undenominational’ intent of the building. Unusually, with vivimus approved and cartoon drawn, there was no Somerville chapel. Indeed, Bell is possibly the only glass-painter to have been commissioned to design a window and then to find an architect to build a chapel to house it.
This had the potential of being a straightforward shoot, with a spacious organ loft positioned at the perfect height for undistorted images. Sadly such plans were ruined by the placement of three chandeliers that followed the central line of the building:
With the chapel having just one stained glass window, and following feedback on my Work in Progress Portfolio, I experimented for the first time with capturing it in two images. To play safe, I also captured the window as a single image – this I did both from the floor and the organ loft, to the left and to the right of the central line (to avoid the chandeliers). Multiple exposure blending necessitated a batch of 20 images per shot, so this ‘straightforward’ shoot ended up taking just under an hour and totalled over 150 images.
Shot at 300mm f/8.0, the selected batch was shot from the organ loft, to the left of the central line.
The combined image was the result of over 15 hours of editing in which there was only the slightest image distortion: lateral offset from the central line produced horizontal convergence, which I opted to correct. The final result had a healthy 25.5MP resolution.
Learning & Truth (Reginald Bell, 1935) Somerville College Chapel
31 Canon AE1 2018 © Kent Krugh
Everything could be seen through these stained glass windows. Even shooting at f/1.2 could not mask the red Ford Focus.
Oxford Blue
Uniquely, this is Oxford’s only un-consecrated chapel. It has no religious affiliation, so the large Reginald Bell stained glass west window depicting Christ comes as a surprise and juxtaposes the ‘undenominational’ intent of the building. Unusually, with 
